#WeAreOpenStack

#WeAre a public cloud provider exploiting OpenStack on a large scale

OpenStack usage continues to grow. It is now one the largest open-source projects in terms of the number of contributors and in its ambition to offer a set of tools to deploy and operate cloud infrastructures. OVH began developing on the OpenStack platform in 2012, just two years after the technology was launched. Europe’s hosting leader and number three worldwide, when it comes to public cloud, OVH is one of the largest OpenStack operators. OpenStack is rarely used for public cloud within the community as the majority of users employ OpenStack for on-site cloud solutions.

#WeAre a member of the OpenStack Foundation

In 2014, OVH became a member of the OpenStack Foundation in order to share its experience, especially in dealing with the challenges surrounding high availability, isolation of resources and scalability, all of which are major concerns for the community.

#WeAre an Infrastructure Donor

Towards the end of 2015, OVH began supporting the project by donating cloud resources to fuel a continuous integration system, which is a crucial tool for the community. Indeed, a large number of the 30,000 jobs launched each day by this system to compile and test patches submitted by thousands of contributors are conducted inside OVH datacentres... using OpenStack instances! This is an example of what constitutes a typical case study for the OVH Public Cloud, a solution specifically designed to respond to a high volume of on-demand requests.

#WeAre proud to announce

100petabytes

of physical data stored on Swift

150,000active instances

listed in March of 2017

OVH Public CloudArchive

For long-term storage.First cold storage solution based on OpenStack

#WeAre in love with OpenStack

2012 - Swift

OVH looking for a scalable storage solution

Towards the end of 2011, OVH launched hubiC, an online file storage solution that met with tremendous success. Within the first year, 130,000 users were wowed by the service as they were using it to upload and store more than 40 TB of data each week. This created a huge strain on the infrastructure and it revealed weaknesses in the scalability of the technical solution that was initially chosen. It was under these circumstances that the OVH teams first became interested in OpenStack and particularly in OpenStack Swift, the project's storage component. hubiC is currently based on this technology, supporting no fewer than 800,000 users.

2014 - Compute

High-performance instances on demand

In 2013, OVH continued to explore the various aspects of the OpenStack project, first to respond to internal needs and then to build its very first public cloud solution. In 2014, OVH offered the first on-demand instances through its “Innovation Lab”. These instances guarantee high performance and customers can manage them from a simple control panel, via the Horizon interface or through the OVH and OpenStack APIs.

2015 - Scaling

Exponential growth of the OpenStack infrastructure

The OVH Public Cloud offering achieved great success in 2015 by setting itself apart with its "no noisy neighbour" guarantee (dedicated resources) and simple, transparent billing system (no hidden costs). This led our teams to start working on expanding the underlying infrastructure and adapting some of its aspects to the OpenStack framework. The North-South traffic on Neutron, for example, was transferred over to the hypervisors and the OVH engineers worked on the parallelisation of the Nova schedulers to sustain the heavy loads generated by several hundreds of instances starting simultaneously.

2016 - Innovation

Focusing on innovation

The OVH teams have been focusing on improving the Public Cloud solution based on OpenStack. This work has been centered around three main lines: integrating OpenStack into the OVH ecosystem, adding new features like the vRack, which is used as a support for Neutron extending private networks among several datacentres across different geographical locations. And lastly, adding new software and hardware components that will generate even better performances for both the infrastructure and user instances.

2017 - Upgrade

Updating the solution and the infrastructure

The OVH Public Cloud infrastructures have been expanding significantly and new zones are being added as we are growing and adding new datacentres. The catalogue is also being updated with SSD instances that provide more efficient local storage as users are increasingly aligned with the cloud philosophy. And in the meantime, R&D teams are reviewing the process of updating the OpenStack infrastructures in order to remain as close as possible to the version currently used in the community, so that we can add patches to the upstream more easily. At the same time, OVH continues to innovate with the addition of the cold storage solution, Public Cloud Archive based on Swift.

Our vision and integration of OpenStack

OVH makes OpenStack more accessible to everyone

User experience (UX) is a one of the main concerns for developers of the Public Cloud user interface. The goal is to facilitate the management of OpenStack instances and storage for users who are not familiar with cloud computing services.

OpenStack services will soon be integrated with the OVH vRack

One of the most interesting features offered by OVH consists of expanding private networks between OpenStack instances even across several geographical zones. Through vRack, instances can privately communicate with one another from one side of the Atlantic to the other and with a latency of less than 80 ms. vRack also allows instances to interconnect with other OVH services, increasing the number of possible use cases. The OVH Public Cloud is often used to relieve overflow of on-site infrastructures or infrastructures hosted on dedicated servers.

OVH at the OpenStack Summit

OVH presented its use case for the open-source OpenStack technology at the Austin OpenStack Summit. As an active user since 2012 and contributor to the foundation in terms of infrastructure, OVH has indeed deployed various blocks of the open-source project on a very large scale to provide on-demand instances (compute) and storage (object storage).